overcast.fm wondering what about closed system like Luminary appeal to some podcasters is it just the money or is a lack of knowledge on how podcasting works
@klandwehr Interesting listen; thanks for sharing it 👍
Thinking about your question (I’m assuming it’s a question, though perhaps you are just musing?), I think there are probably several reasons, like the hosts mention. If people aren’t already familiar, they might think podcasting is too complex, especially if they were born before, say, 1995. And if someone is used to being paid for their time, a company promising a nice fat paycheck for that time and all the support needed to produce and launch the podcast (and taking all the financial risk, what little there is for a podcast) is going to be appealing. Thinking specifically of Hollywood types here, but the Luminary/etc. model also is much closer to what they’re used to: a big company buys an idea/tv show/movie from the creator, produces and distributes that thing to audiences, collects the money, and gives the creator a small cut of the profits. If celebrity potential-podcasters weren’t bloggers, or familiar with blogging and podcasting, they may not realize that blogging and podcasting don’t require those stuctures—anyone can blog or podcast, on their own site, distribute their work freely to everyone, everywhere, monetize via ads/sponsorships/memberships, and so forth, so the familiar business/distribution model that Luminary/etc. pitch meshes perfectly with their understanding of how the (creative) world works.
As the hosts also point out, though, there’s a lack of strategic/long-term thinking, not only about the podcast’s “owning” its own audience and its work, but also about the need for the middleman at all—celebrities already have a following, a built-in audience that will follow them anywhere. Whatever motivates these people to “forget” that they’re already famous and have a giant audience and hitch their reins to Luminary/etc. is the same thing that causes notables to stay on terrible places like Twitter, selling their power to bad actors. And whatever that is, we’ve yet to figure it out 😟
@smokey it was both musing and a question. As someone who was born way way before '95 I take exception to that idea However I do agree with you on your thoughts on celebrities and what they are use to.
@klandwehr Born a fair bit before 1995 here and speaking from experience—I was unfamiliar with what podcasting recording/production entailed before Jean had me on the Micro Monday podcast, and I thought it was way more involved—but I probably shouldn’t generalize off-the-cuff like that, either; sorry.
What I was trying to get at is that I think the current generation, the so-called “digital natives” who have grown up always having a computer (or an iPad!) and whose first phone probably was a smartphone, have a much greater fluency (again, generally speaking) with digital production. (For people born before 1995 or whenever exactly, we can probably remember when we/our families got our first computer—it was an event; for those born after, their families had always had a computer. Etc.) Snapchat, vlogging on YouTube, etc., all are broadly similar to podcasting, so even if they don’t know the specifics of podcasting, that younger generation is both experienced (it’s ubiquitous!) and at ease with the production skillset in a way that those of us born before 1995 are less likely to be, generationally speaking.
I could be wrong, though, and I’m the only one who thought podcasting entailed a lot of complex setup and such until Manton introduced Wavelength ;-) —but that’s my sense of the generational difference :-)